The fact that internet search engines other than Google exist is very easily overlooked.
Yet, if your intended interest group lives in nations like China, South Korea, or Russia, you’re missing the vast majority of your target audience in case you’re not appearing in their favored search engines.
In Russia, Yandex is by a long shot the greatest search tool.
Over 57% of Russian searchers depend on Yandex as their principal search engine and Yandex has risen to hold a staggering 56.5% share in the Russian search market.
It is positioned as the best Russian web property. There’s additionally Yandex usage in neighboring nations, for example, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.
But what about China?
Working in a similar space as Google, Baidu (BIDU) is China’s biggest search engine accounting for more than 80% of the nation’s internet searches.
Google does have a solid footing in business sectors around the globe; specifically, Google’s value in China, while insignificant, is quite apparent. Because of the intricate and complex nature of the Chinese government, industry pioneers have monopolistic control. This is why Baidu takes the trophy in China.
But what’s so special about these search engines and how can they help you increase online presence?
Let’s find out!
The Yandex Search Engine
Yandex works, for the most part, like the other prevalent search engines.
You type in a search query, hit enter, and afterward, you see a list items page with a lot of blue connections, URLs, and portrayals.
Contingent upon the inquiry question, you may likewise observe pictures, recordings, and different sorts of indexed lists.
This is what shows when we type in my very own site’s name:
And this goes for most search phrases. The results match those given out by Google SEO and that speaks volumes of how reliable this search engine is.
Nonetheless, there are times when the query content would haphazardly change to Russian.
Strangely, in the event that you are not content with Yandex’s outcomes, you can click the buttons to look on Google and Bing at the base of each search result page.
In fact, Yandex’s market share (48.79%) is greater than that of Google (47.88%).
What is Baidu?
People in the West might have never known about Baidu, however, it is the most famous web search engines in China.
In fact, it perhaps is the biggest organization on the planet, which implies it is an unimaginably significant stage for you to promote on.
It is usually named the ‘Chinese Google’. The highlights and design of Baidu are fundamentally the same as that of Google.
They are both incredible web search tools for sites, sound records, and pictures just as an email service, a language interpreter, and a web mapping service.
Baidu has been in activity within the territory of China for near 20 years and has seen relentless growth every year since its creation. As a significant economy booster and a characteristic advertising goal for your brand, it is one of China’s tech sweethearts of the 21st century.
The Baidu search engine is available at Baidu.com. You can play out a content-based inquiry from the landing page to begin with or you can utilize the menu at the top of the site to get to different services to look through news, maps, recordings, etc.
A few questions on Baidu give answers at the top of the results page. Such is depicted in the image below;
This is generally the situation in the event that you pose a question or look into something that has a quick answer, for example, the climate or a definition.
SEO Guidelines for Yandex and Baidu – 2020
Before you start advertising your brand on these remarkable search engines, it is of utmost importance that you learn how to optimize your content such that it ranks on the top pages.
So let’s dig into the SEO guidelines to follow for Yandex and Baidu!
Yandex SEO 2020 Guidelines
According to Yandex SEO guidelines 2020, optimizing your content or website for Yandex SEO can be done correctly only if you have Yandex Webmaster Tools.
Not very unlike Google, this tool is a free analytics service to look for crawling errors and check the website’s performance.
Considering this, it can be easily said that the Yoast SEO best practices for Yandex SEO are quite similar to those for other search engines.
Here’s how you can do it.
1. Yandex Indexing
Since Yandex is a little different than Google in the sense that newer websites come up in the search engines a little later than they would in Google, you need to start by uploading the sitemap of your website on Yandex Webmaster.
2. Geo-Targeting
Instead of local SEO, Yandex prioritizes geo-targeted searches.
According to Yandex SEO 2020 tips, all inquiries there are isolated into geo-dependent and geo-independent.
The latter ones are regular quests, similar to a book. Such questions don’t need to be area based.
With regards to items or administrations, clients from various districts, much of the time, will see diverse search results.
3. User Engagement
According to Yandex SEO 2020, it is very important to engage your user to gain a better ranking.
To master this, look at where your users are coming from.
Look for the sources, analyze user behavior from the new and old sources. And now optimize your website and content to match their behavior.
One good way to do this is by optimizing your website for slow connections as well. This can be achieved by reducing the page size to load faster.
4. Comprehensible Content
Content is king.
Regardless of the search engine, you’re working on, the content will always be king.
Make your content readable and informative.
Yandex SEO is stricter than Google when it comes to the quality of content. You can’t write duplicate, spammy, or artificially optimized content and get away with it.
Yandex has two algorithms for content quality: AGS filter to filter duplicate content and Thematic Index of Citation (TIC) to analyze site authority.
So write content to satisfy user intent and you will definitely be able to rank your website better.
5. Backlinking
Yandex has cut off backlinking from their ranking procedure.
This means that while you can have links elsewhere, those links will only be of value if they bring traffic.
In case you think of cheating Yandex by posting spammy links to influence search algos, Yandex will find you and will kill you using Minusinsk algo.
6. Mobile-Optimization
Yandex’s algo called Valdivostok helps rank the websites that are mobile-optimized higher.
Now, it would only matter if your website looks like that in the image below.
If you’re not sure whether your website is mobile optimized or not, you can check the pages for errors on Yandex Webmaster.
Baidu SEO Guidelines 2020
Given to the large population of China, it is only wise to think of expanding your SEO efforts to the ever-growing nation.
You can significantly benefit from using the Baidu SEO 2020 guidelines to grow your business there.
Here’s how you can optimize your website to suit Baidu search algos.
1. Curate Readable Content
Earlier, Baidu SEO alog spider, the search engine algorithm only paid attention to technically optimized content. However, now, it’s about readability.
So, having a friendly URL, using Meta tags in your title, having the keyword in your title tags could give you good lead in Baidu SEO.
But with the recent Baidu SEO 2020 update, the content has become king in the Baidu algorithm.
With this new update, websites with poor quality content will be banned and penalized.
Unlike Google, Baidu spider now focuses on enriching the user experience.
2. Creative Page Title
Along with good content, a friendly title is also significant in the ranking.
Well, it’s easy if you concise your title with a clear idea in it.
As the algorithm has become smarter, it’ll be irrelevant if you stuff it only with keywords. The title should be created in a way that users can easily relate to their search query.
3. Mobile-Friendliness
More than 98% of internet users in China use mobile phones. So, optimizing your site for mobile users is advisable, according to Baidu SEO 2020 guidelines.
Baidu bans sites providing a poor user experience, especially when it comes to mobile phones.
Make sure that your website looks like this when it is optimized.
So, make your site highly responsive for mobile users.
4. Banned ads
To ensure enriching user experience, Baidu has recently started to ban sites showing excessive advertisements.
According to Baidu SEO 2020 tips, only full-screen ads will be allowed for mobile users. Here are a few tips to optimize your mobile landing page.
- Don’t put in-text ads.
- No popup ads
- No floating ads
- Don’t replay any ads
5. HTTPs Websites
Unlike other search engines, Baidu has recently started to give preference to https sites. So, on the off chance, you want to increase your site preferences, change your certification.
Follow the given rules:
- The ICP license (Internet Content Publishing License)
The digital marketing of China’s government doesn’t prefer any foreign-hosted website. As Baidu is completely based on the Chinese market, it can’t overlook government policies.
To host your website in China, you will need an ICP license. Internet content publishing licenses will refrain your site from getting penalized. Also, it’ll increase the site loading speed. Eventually, it’ll lead to a better user experience.
- The Significance of Chinese language
Baidu is predominantly optimized for the Chinese. The people using Baidu mainly belong to mainland China. So, it’s obvious that your site content should be simplified for Chinese. If you use a translator to translate content and paste it on our Chinese website, your site will be banned from Baidu.
- Focus on good keywords
In Baidu, only simplified Chinese language is given preference. And in simplified Chinese language, each character has different meanings. So, it can lead to a completely different meaning if you don’t focus on researching the Chinese keyword. You can always get your keywords checked by a native speaker to avoid miscommunication.
Yandex SEO vs Baidu SEO– Which One Should You Focus Your SEO Efforts on?
If you just want to focus on increasing online visibility to increase your sales, you need to work on the user experience side of your website.
As more people love your website, visibility will increase, along with improved ranking.
Now, when it comes to user experience, you need to be sure of where your users belong.
You can’t be following the same SEO guidelines for search engines in all countries. And so, it is important to choose which country you want to focus on and then optimize your content according to their most powerful search engine.
When it comes to China, you can’t ignore the 1.4 billion people. So, choose Baidu when you want to promote yourself in China.
Similarly, for Russia, follow Yandex 2020 SEO guidelines to gain an edge there.
Final Thoughts
Weighing your options will help you comprehend which search engine to focus your efforts on. The Yandex SEO 2020 guidelines will help you understand how to rank your site better in Russia.
And similarly, you can’t underestimate the value of Baidu if you’re to expand in China. It has an overwhelming market share there and you would need to follow the Baidu SEO 2020 guide to gain the most of it.
Let me know in the comments about your insights!
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